Call data is the missing piece of the data puzzle

You have just begun a new Paid Search campaign promoting your business. The aim of the campaign is to generate either online leads through a web form on your site or generate phone calls to your in-bound sales team.

After one month you can see that 3 of your Google Ads have generated 100 online leads and 20 sales worth $200 each. The other ads have only generated 10 sales worth $50 each. Using this data, you decide to optimise your online campaigns, focusing on the ads which generated leads and sales for your business and cutting ads which weren’t.

After another month the ads have generated another 100 online leads but overall leads and sales have dropped and you can’t figure out why.

After investigating you realise that phone traffic into your business seems to have dropped. You don’t have an accurate way of recording this data but you know anecdotally from your phone staff that the number of phone calls has dropped in the past month.

Suddenly it dawns on you – the other ads, which were generating only a handful of online leads had actually generated 25 phone leads. Those 25 phone leads turned into 10 $1,000 sales, giving a total value of $10,000, compared to the $4,500 of sales from online leads. Without even realizing it, your phone leads were actually generating you more revenue than your online leads, at a cheaper CPA.

The above scenario is one that is very common to both small, medium and large businesses and agencies alike across Australia. While tracking online activity is seen as the bread and butter of any business with an online or digital presence, phone call analytics is still somewhat of a challenge to most businesses.

The consequences of not tracking this key piece of data is you will be trying to make decisions around your marketing spend without having the full picture in front of you.

By utilizing call tracking technology you can gain insights into what happens before, during and after a phone call is made to your business.

With all the pieces of the puzzle, you can make better and more informed decisions about how your campaigns are performing and how you want to optimize your marketing budget. You may find that your overall Cost Per Click (CPC), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost Per Lead (CPL) drops once call data is included.

Furthermore, a good call tracking provider will have their solution integrated into a number of analytics, tag management, ad management, CRMs and optimization platforms so the call tracking data can be seamlessly analysed and used by those platforms.

So before you make another decision, stop for a second and ask yourself the following questions?

Do phone calls play an important part in my businesses path to purchase?